Author: Nedra Pickler
Publication: Yahoo News
Date: August 1, 2007
URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070801/ap_on_el_pr/obama_terrorism_7
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama
said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down
terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described
his foreign policy skills as naive.
The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President
Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations
in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan
will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars
in U.S. military aid.
"Let me make this clear," Obama
said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains
who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a
terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida
leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value
terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."
The excerpts were provided by the Obama campaign
in advance of the speech.
Obama's speech comes the week after his rivalry
with New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton erupted into a public fight over
their diplomatic intentions.
Obama said he would be willing to meet leaders
of rogue states like Cuba, North Korea and Iran without conditions, an idea
that Clinton criticized as irresponsible and naive. Obama responded by using
the same words to describe Clinton's vote to authorize the Iraq war and called
her "Bush-Cheney lite."
The speech was a condemnation of President
Bush's leadership in the war on terror. He said the focus on Iraq has left
Americans in more danger than before Sept. 11, 2001, and that Bush has misrepresented
the enemy as Iraqis who are fighting a civil war instead of the terrorists
responsible for the attacks six years ago.
"He confuses our mission," Obama
said, then he spread responsibility to lawmakers like Clinton who voted for
the invasion. "By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is
giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to
give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined
cost, with undetermined consequences."
Obama said that as commander in chief he would
remove troops from Iraq and putting them "on the right battlefield in
Afghanistan and Pakistan." He said he would send at least two more brigades
to Afghanistan and increase nonmilitary aid to the country by $1 billion.
He also said he would create a three-year,
$5 billion program to share intelligence with allies worldwide to take out
terrorist networks from Indonesia to Africa.
